What Shakesville Said

Shakesville: We Write Letters
This blog resolves to acknowledge our social privileges without defensiveness, to welcome the comments and contributions of socially marginalised voices, and when our work builds on the ideas of others we will fully attribute our debt to their work.
We will no doubt get it wrong at times. Call us on it. [...]

Open Thread: can there be feminist porn?

The organisers of Canada’s Third Annual Feminist Porn Awards (Toronto, April 4th and 5th 200 think so.
In 2006 we decided that it’s not enough to criticize adult films for not adequately representing women’s - and in many cases, men’s - sexuality. So we decided to do something about it. As porn star and performance [...]

Event: MichFest Halfway Soiree (and a way to promote and organise feminist meetings)

Another event landed in my mailbox:
Third Annual MichFest Half-Way Soirée party on March 1st in honor of the six month mark to the famed Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. All are welcome to join us at Cattyshack, Brooklyn, (249 4th Avenue between President & Carroli St.) at 6:30 pm-3:00 am, pre-party drumming circle 5:30-6:30 [...]

Feminism Friday: When women who advocate for women’s rights reject the label “feminist”

2nd May 2008: This post has been updated in light of the recent flare-ups in the rounds of discussion about how mainstream feminism remains inadequate in engaging with matters of race. See footnote.
There are many critics who view “feminism” (and the progressive movement generally) as focussing too much on the West, and too much [...]

Centenary week: Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir was born on the 9th of January, 1908.
Toril Moi writes in The Guardian that all of us should read her masterpiece, The Second Sex (of which Random House has recently announced a new English translation to be published in the next few years, finally acknowledging long-standing criticisms of the only English translation [...]

Feminism Friday: The origins of the word “sexism”

Although it has long since become a household phrase, the origins of the term “sexism” are not widely known. In researching this article, I found that the term is most commonly dated to the 1968 paper “Freedom for Movement Girls - Now”, however there are actually two other known appearances of this word prior to [...]

Elizabeth Cady Stanton: “The Solitude of Self (1892)”

This speech, was in Stanton’s own judgement “the best thing I have ever written” and in the judgement of Susan B. Anthony “the strongest and most unanswerable argument and appeal ever made . . . for the full freedom and franchise of women”. It’s already fairly widely available on the internet, but as a [...]